The recently released PlayStation 5 exclusive Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s dev team claims that the internal storages that we can hook to the PlayStation 5 via its M.2 SSD storage are barely distinguishable from what the built-in SSD of the console offers.

The new feature of the PlayStation 5 is currently only available to the beta testers of the new PS5 firmware. It brings a long-awaited option to install another SSD into the PlayStation 5 via the connection that went unused for several months. Insomniac Games, part of Sony Interactive Entertainment, has started to test external SSDs, and they got surprisingly good results.

“[It’s] exciting to see [the] PlayStation 5 beta testers getting access to the M.2 SSD feature! I’m sure the public beta will result in plenty of benchmarking across different games and drives. Still, I’ll spoil with some of our results from early testing at Insomniac on Ratchet & Clank: [Rift Apart:] it’s looking good,” Mike Fitzgerald, the core technology director of Insomniac Games, wrote on Twitter.

“The Gen4 drives we tried that met the recommended specs gave results almost indistinguishable from the internal SSD. The rest of the I/O path still in use (hardware Kraken decompression, etc.) is pulling its weight in delivering the crazy loading moments in [Ratchet & Clank:] Rift Apart,” he added.

The studio also tested some 4th-generation SSDs that are below recommended specs. The results weren’t too bad, but Insomniac Games did experience up to 15% slower loading in some of the most stressed areas of the new Ratchet & Clank game, which is why Fitzgerald reminded us to consider the specs of the new SSD we plan to purchase, as the game relies on high-quality storage.

Currently, Seagate’s FireCuda 530, and the recently announced Western Digital M.2 NVMe SSDs, hit Sony’s specs.

Source: PSL